Commentary by Michael Wade on Leadership, Ethics, Management, and Life

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Proportional Deference

An excerpt from George F. Will's advice to the loyal opposition on how to respond to the stimulus package:The opposition's third duty is to assert inconvenient truths, one of which is that the truth shall make you modest. There never is a moment when an open society that wants to remain such does not need the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who said: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." So the deference accorded this president should be proportional to his willingness to acknowledge that neither he nor anyone else can know whether the stimulus will work.